Martin Eden

Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, 2019, Hulu.
Mank, directed by David Fincher, 2020, Netflix.
Martin Eden, directed by Pietro Marcello, 2019, Mubi.
The Little Drummer Girl, directed by Park Chan-wook, 2018, Sundance Now.

I've been trying to make myself like Scorsese lately. Not Scorsese the person, he seems delightful. Whenever I watch his old documentary about the history of film, or his introductions to the more obscure works he has championed and funded the restoration of, I immediately like him immensely. He is warm and genial and there is a lot to learn from him.

What I mean is his films, which I have always found so dull. The things he is interested in (men, violence, criminal underworld) are not things I am interested in. But I also used to be bored by Henry James and now Henry James puts me in a state of ecstasy, so I thought I would do some sort of immersion therapy, surround myself with Scorsese and see if it took this time.

I watched The Wolf of Wall Street and got up about thirty minutes into it to make some tea; my partner asked if I wanted him to pause and I said “nah.” I watched The Age of Innocence and started thinking about how much more I liked the Terence Davies Edith Wharton adaptation more, The House of Mirth, the one with Gillian Anderson. I started Googling to see if that was available on any streaming services, but it's not, so I sighed and went back to scoping the interiors of the homes of the wealthy alongside Scorsese and Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis. Yes, wealth and comfort is like a prison, thanks. I watched Casino and was playing a game on my phone for most of it, I would only put it down when Sharon Stone was on the screen. The fact that there were long stretches without Sharon Stone on screen seemed like a terrible mistake. The other actors seemed to be doing Scorsese shtick, but here was Stone as a fuming, seething, whirling demon of resentment, and I was transfixed.

So no, I still don't like Scorsese, although lately it seems like one must like Scorsese, for the sake of the culture. There's this argument that has been happening on social media for over a year now, whether Scorsese or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (lol) is more moral. Scorsese makes art, yes, but his films are all about straight white men, he glorifies criminals, the violence he depicts is meaningless and grotesque. The Marvel films, on the other hand, have a diverse cast of characters, the people who die truly deserve it, and it teaches valuable lessons about teamwork or something. Some Scorsese fans countered with the assertion that Scorsese doesn't glorify criminals, because he shows so many of them dying violently or ending up in prison. So actually his work is moral, because it shows that if you join the mafia you'll die bloody on a sidewalk.

It's the kind of discourse you'd expect if you conducted an experiment where you lock away a group of people and limit their entire cultural input to Aesop’s fables and those Afterschool Specials that insist that after your first hit of PCP you'll jump out a ten-story window under the mistaken belief that you can fly. Then you show those people Goodfellas and watch them contort in confusion. “Oh. Oh no.” But some of these people are film critics, they get paid to say these things, which is remarkable.

Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, 2019, Hulu.

It's like the running joke that isn't really a joke, the surprise that extremely wealthy model/wife/cooking-influencer-something-or-other Chrissy Teigen liked the movie Parasite. Parasite is a film about one family from the lower classes infiltrating and scheming against a wealthy family as they serve as their domestic workers, and, by the breathless way it was talked about by some leftist critics, you’d think it was Mao’s Little Red Book, here to spark a revolution. So how could a rich person like it? People use her social media post about Parasite as a gotcha about her obliviousness, her faux wokeness. It reappears on Twitter every time she tweets something that reveals that her relatable, just-one-of-the-girls persona is an elitist act made to create parasocial relationships that will benefit her financially whenever she has another spatula that is exactly like all the other spatulas in the whole world to sell to the masses. She was instead, it is implied in these quote retweets, supposed to see herself as the dim, useless and pampered housewife, carrying a tiny fluffy dog around and being outwitted by the poorer family and then . . . feel an intense shame and get rid of her riches, redistributing them to her Twitter followers, I guess?

But of course one symptom of capitalism is to believe you deserve everything you have, or might have in the future. Like Jessica/Ki-Jung, the con artist extraordinaire in Parasite drunkenly yelling to the heavens “worry about me, not them!” when her father starts to feel bad about the workers they had to force from their positions to find the precarious level of comfort they have now. Of course Teigen is going to relate to the scrappy underdogs who have to fight for every resource made available to them, who have to scrape and claw, who have to relentlessly displace people they see as more privileged or blessed with greater advantages than them. The film exists, after all. It couldn't have been so revolutionary that the people with money who supply the funding were scared off. They, too, probably see themselves in the same way as Teigen.

It's understandable that people would look to art to carry this weight for them. After all, the world is quite bad. We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make it even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation. We have essentially been functioning without actual political representation for decades now, as politicians prefer to work for the special interests that can get them paid more than your typical civil servant salary than to create legal protections for your typical gig worker. And while those special interests were assisting politicians in their dismantling of public life so that everything, even water, could be privatized and commodified, leading to a point where dozens of people can die during a pretty normal weather event to save the power company some money, the 80s and 90s were spitting out dumb films about how all that's needed is one man, speaking the truth, to bring about the end of apartheid or to save Jews from the Holocaust or protect a small town from a greedy company. No wonder we so dumbly expect our artists, writers, actors, creative professionals, and public figures to be moral agents and political radicals.

There is a video I think about quite a lot, an interview Errol Morris conducted with Donald Trump about the movie Citizen Kane, back when he was a celebrity only for being a rich asshole and not for being a fascist white nationalist. Trump was a huge fan of Hollywood, he probably would have been actually happy working in film rather than deranged by amphetamines (probably) and delusions of greatness from his life in real estate and celebrity. But here is Trump, essentially our disappointing little Charles Foster Kane if his presidential bid had gone anywhere, praising Citizen Kane but not getting that, you know, he himself is Kane and he will probably die alone and unloved, used by everyone around him and never truly known by anyone.

If film worked the way the Twitter brigade insists, Trump would have cast one look at Orson Welles playing a miserable millionaire megalomaniac and understood it as an omen, a prophecy, the sphinx at the crossroads warning him of dangers farther down the path. But that's not how film works, nor prophecy.

There's a hard twist at the center of David Fincher's otherwise disappointing Mank, which explores the origins of Citizen Kane and the social life of its screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he flits between high and low society. Allowed into the orbit of William Randolph Hearst, Mank is able to see how power and wealth operates, how it isolates and deranges those who have it and creates a magnet that draws sycophants, yes-men, and other pathetic creatures to your door. But Mank is also witness to how the absence of wealth and power isolates and deranges those on the opposite side of the economic scale, as people, even friends, avert their eyes to your plight as if your bad luck could be contagious.

The end result of this knowledge is Citizen Kane, about a man's tragic rise and fall through wealth and power, and Donald J. Trump saw it, liked it, and upon entering the office of president created tax cuts for the super wealthy and removed social welfare programs for the super disadvantaged. I'm sure there are finance bros who every year watch It's a Wonderful Life and think “it sure is” as they wipe away their tears with money. (Just kidding, who uses paper money anymore, they probably use the pelts of endangered animals as handkerchiefs.)

But along the road to creating Citizen Kane, Fincher lingers on a campaign by Hollywood power brokers to defeat the socialist candidate for governor Upton Sinclair, who might actually keep some people from dying of hunger during the Depression era in which the actions of the film are set. The studio bigwigs use actors to pose as worried mothers, farm workers, good decent church folk to plead with their fellow citizens not to vote for socialism. They rely on racial and sexual stereotypes to provoke fear in voters about what justice might cost them. The propaganda campaign works — and Fincher's version is mercifully not heavy-handed in making comparisons to today's Fake News problem — and Sinclair is defeated.

Is the moral lesson, then, that art cannot save the world, but it can certainly make it much worse? (And if Parasite can't radicalize the masses, like a kind of Das Kapital: The Return, what is it even good for?) We are very accustomed to seeing our artists and writers depicted as heroes in film. It doesn't even matter if they, like Upton Sinclair, create muckraking art or explicitly political work; just having the nerve and the guts to stand up to society's demand that you conform and live a respectable life is seen as heroic enough. (Now that American society demands that you be “artistic” and precarious and monetize your creative production, it is not actually a rebellious act to make a life in a creative field, but we'll leave that for another time.) We are neck-deep in this idea in film and the new Italian film Martin Eden plays with our expectations by having its titular writer announce in its opening scene, “I am also a force. And my force is fearsome as long as I have the power of my words to counter that of the world.” “Yes!” we think. Here is a man of vigor, setting out on the long, lonely hero's journey of becoming a True Artist. What a great thing to do.

Mank, directed by David Fincher, 2020, Netflix.

Martin Eden is a man of the working class, and his stories are the stories of the working class. We don't hear them, but we can assume they are Rossellini-like, as everyone keeps telling him they are too sad, too real, they ask him to just relent a little and give something a happy ending or at least a glimmer of hope. He refuses to lie. And he does follow the traditional hero's journey in that he becomes something of an arrogant asshole, puffing himself up in a desperate attempt to survive the experience of becoming a writer. His fellow dwellers in the lower classes don't understand his work and interfere with his ambitions. The cultured upper class finds him amusing. A rich girl who thinks she loves him keeps him around as a bit of a pet, ditching him the second he starts barking at her wealthy peers who mistreat him. And we as audience members want him to succeed, despite the chaotic fragmentation of his worldview and his mistreatment of the women around him, simply because we've been trained to root for these kinds of characters.

An older writer takes Martin under his wing and tries to ground the young writer in a political ideology that will help him deal with “the disappointment that is approaching.” That disappointment is success. He takes him to socialist rallies, so he can see the political organization of the poor people he writes about, but Martin uses the opportunity to start fights with the socialists about the importance of the individual. It's a necessary fight to have! To hash out some of the contradictions and tensions between the individual and the collective, who is allowed to speak for a people and tell (and profit from) their stories, and how membership in these larger groups can and does stifle the creative spirit in some, but it always devolves into screaming matches. Martin's politics become twisted into a cynical satire, railing at “power” in the name of the “people,” empty rhetoric that the upper classes adore. The film offers no easy solutions to this contradiction, and it would be more harrowing to watch if it were not for Luca Marinelli's remarkable, hard yet vulnerable face, on which we can see an entire century's ideas about the power of art and politics play out. Martin is eaten away by his fascist imagination, which Mia Ruf detailed beautifully in Caesura in December. He inflates his ego as a defense mechanism against the hardship he must endure to establish his career, but as he finds acceptance (and money) he loses control over it and it transforms into a pathological narcissism. What will help you survive one context will surely destroy you in another. And I don't know what it would take to survive bringing forth the misery of poverty and alienation of the lower classes right up to the noses of the elites and have them laugh and applaud you for it. Somebody ask Bong Joon-ho.

Martin Eden, directed by Pietro Marcello, 2019, Mubi.

But it's perhaps Charlie of Park Chan-wook's The Little Drummer Girl who most accurately embodies the political artist of today. She's a young actress, vaguely “radical,” looking for a cause to support. Unlike Martin Eden, who rejects socialism because it does not immediately conform to his worldview and he cannot meet it halfway, the young Londoner Charlie, played by Florence Pugh, wanders in and out of various political positions. She uses “bourgeois” as an insult, to gain sympathy and authenticity she invents a story about a hard-scrabble childhood and a father dragged off to prison (in reality she is solidly middle class and her life has seen no such drama), and she attends different rallies and stars in productions of political works like George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.

Her clearest political notion is that she believes in “peace,” and as a result she is easily recruited by Mossad to help track down a Palestinian bomber who was recently involved in an attack that resulted in the death of a child. The Israelis sit her down and tell her what they have endured (the story, adapted from a John le Carré novel, is set in the 70s), including the concentration camp tattoo still marking the Mossad team leader Martin's arm. They tell her of indiscriminate terror attacks that take the lives of children, rabbis, mothers, the elderly. She is swayed, she becomes sympathetic, and she is sent on an undercover mission in Lebanon.

Where she meets Palestinians who sit down and tell her what they have endured, including the scars they still bear from vicious torture and air raids. They tell her of massacres and displacement, which took the lives of their brothers, sisters, babies, and parents. She is swayed, she becomes sympathetic, and in the end she becomes confused in her loyalty, trying to choose both at once and making an enormous mess of everything as a result.

Part of what makes Little Drummer Girl so compelling — other than the truly great outfits Charlie gets to wear — is how it shows that political affiliation, that sympathy and empathy, are tricks of aesthetics. We believe the victimization of this group is greater than any other because their stories are better, because they have produced this very convincing documentary or podcast, because they put their scars and their wounds in your face in a way you can understand. (Charlie seems similar to the white people who pay to go to anti-racist training, who pay people to shame them for their racial privilege — she is quite swayed by the argument that the mess of Israel and Palestine is the fault of the British and as such she has a responsibility to atone.)

At first, the way the ending deviates from the novel bothered me. In the book, Charlie ends up going mad from the confusion of conflicting loyalties, of trying to make sense of the complexity of resentment and terror and foreign interests and all the rest of it. In the adaptation, Charlie traipses off to have a little love affair, no longer paying attention to all of the people she helped get killed. “Are you Jewish?” a Palestinian asks her, but no. She's not Arab, either, nor German. The Palestinian is confused why she is here, why she is doing this. “I'm an actress,” she answers. It's just another role for her, albeit one a bit more exciting than playing Joan of Arc to an audience of a couple dozen. But then, it made sense that she is the only one involved who gets to walk away. Like Jared Kushner prancing off to “solve” the Middle East Crisis on behalf of the Trump Administration, she can walk into a scene of mass death, cause a little more just as a side effect of her presence, and then walk out, undamaged.

With actresses being removed from television programs because of their rightwing politics, male stars dropped from films for sexting in a non-PC kind of way, we obviously believe that the political integrity of our creative professionals is deeply important. (No one seems to mind so much that this has not created a flourishing of powerful and meaningful art, just more remakes and sequels and off-shoots.) But maybe that's why Mank, easily the most disappointing thing I streamed for this column, inspires the most hope in me. It wasn't really surprising that it was immediately attacked by various figures for being mostly about men, for pairing young women with old men, for various other woke infractions. But the ideas it is working with are complicated, and it refuses to simply throw in a colorblind cast, give a heroically strong woman for little girls (the little girls who watch Fincher films?) to look up to and be done with it. Instead, Mank is ambitious in its attempt to manage them, but it doesn't quite. It mostly fails, but it's the attempt at letting it be wild and sophisticated and unresolved that keeps me clicking around on the streaming services, looking for equally exciting failures.

The Little Drummer Girl, directed by Park Chan-wook, 2018, Sundance Now.